What does one make of a secular Marxist who’s beloved by traditionalist Catholics? Of an writer who was a favourite each of Jimmy Carter and of Steve Bannon? Of a thinker heavily influenced by Freud who made himself persona non grata amongst many mental health professionals for his jeremiads against contemporary psychology? You don’t hear about him as much anymore—he died in 1994—but there was a time when Christopher “Kit” Lasch was all but a household name.
You don’t hear about him as much anymore, but there was a time when Christopher “Kit” Lasch was all but a household name.
Lasch became famous together with his 1979 book The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations, though he was probably at his polemical and incisive best within the posthumous 1995 collection of essays, The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy. There’s something in each for everybody to hate, and yet take a have a look at the footnotes in a few of your favorite books: Lasch appears within the works of everyone from Robert Coles to the philosopher Charles Taylor to the political scientist Patrick Deneen to the late Jesuit environmentalist and theologian David Toolan, S.J.
Lasch never wrote for America—he wrote commonly for Commonweal later in life and was a contributing editor to The Recent Oxford Review, two journals that might not possibly be further apart on the Catholic spectrum—but his name got here up often enough in America. When San Francisco Archbishop John R. Quinn wrote a critique for the magazine in 1991 of a proposal to distribute condoms to schoolchildren, he approvingly cited Lasch’s commentary in The Culture of Narcissism on government attempts “to erode and appropriate the authority and the role of oldsters in regard to their children.”
Eleven years later, Philadelphia Archbishop Charles J. Chaput, O.F.M.Cap., a prelate infrequently related to Archbishop Quinn’s ecclesial views, also cited Lasch in America, for his description of recent Americans as “locked in a everlasting present, permanently restless, permanently looking forward to change,” often on the expense of tradition and stability, in churches just as much as anywhere else.
In 2015, I had occasion to return to Lasch myself in a review of Elizabeth Lunbeck’s The Americanization of Narcissism in America. No fan of Lasch, Lunbeck described her book as a “mission to rescue the concept of narcissism” and to return it to the realm of psychoanalysis moderately than cultural critique. She argued that much of what Lasch saw as narcissistic behavior in American life was actually a welcome increase in levels of self-esteem and assertiveness, and that some extent of narcissism is useful in the event of ambition, creativity and empathy. (In her defense, the book was published before the election of Donald Trump.)
Lasch on Updike: “He’s more industrious than I, but I believe his stuff lacks perception and doesn’t go very deep. He’s primarily a humorist. As he himself admits, he might be a hack.”
Lasch was born in Omaha, Neb., in 1932, the son of a philosophy professor mother and a Rhodes Scholar father who later won the Pulitzer Prize for editorials criticizing the Vietnam War. Lasch himself attended Harvard University, where his roommate was—no joke—John Updike. “He writes poetry, stories and draws cartoons and sends all of those to numerous magazines. He has even had a number of things accepted,” Lasch told his parents about Updike. “He’s more industrious than I, but I believe his stuff lacks perception and doesn’t go very deep. He’s primarily a humorist. As he himself admits, he might be a hack.” Updike later wrote a story about their time together, “The Christian Roommates,” that was made right into a TV movie in 1984.
After receiving his doctorate in history from Columbia University, Lasch taught for a time on the University of Iowa and Northwestern University before moving to the University of Rochester, where he taught from 1970 to 1994. Between 1962 and 1977 he published five books that inveighed against American-style capitalism but additionally offered pointed critiques of progressive politics, including 1969’s The Agony of the American Left, a political position that earned him labels starting from cultural conservative to neo-Marxist gadfly.
When The Culture of Narcissism was published in 1979, its condemnation of the therapeutic mindset he saw overtaking American community life firmly established Lasch as a crucial cultural critic and public mental. Soon after The Culture of Narcissism made the best-seller lists, then-President Jimmy Carter invited Lasch to the White House, and a few of the book’s themes found their way into Carter’s infamous “malaise” speech in 1979. One can imagine this line from Carter’s nationally televised address coming straight from Lasch’s pen:
In a nation that was pleased with labor, strong families, close-knit communities, and our faith in God, too lots of us now are likely to worship self-indulgence and consumption. Human identity is not any longer defined by what one does, but by what one owns.
Because Lasch was critical of divorce and legal abortion and was a powerful proponent of the family unit, he was often associated within the Nineteen Eighties with Reaganite politics, though he despised and sometimes wrote against the libertarian thread running through Nineteen Eighties American conservatism and was no fan of Reagan (he thought even less of William F. Buckley). His later writings had a powerful concentrate on the negative effects of the American obsession with progress, including The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics (1991).
Soon after The Culture of Narcissism made the best-seller lists, then-President Jimmy Carter invited Lasch to the White House.
I first encountered Lasch as a school student in a course on political philosophy where we read several of the essays that may later appear in The Revolt of the Elites. In those essays, Lasch excoriated globalization and the increasing economic gap between the highest 20 percent of American earners and the remaining, arguing that the cosmopolitan cadres that increasingly dominated political and cultural life had little interest in accepting the obligations of citizenship or the duty to support their fellow residents. Such “world residents,” he wrote, had no reason to support traditional family structures, working-class residents or the increasing variety of Americans afflicted with crime, poverty, addiction or mental illness.
The Revolt of the Elites made Lasch something of a populist icon, which explains a few of his appeal to the likes of Steve Bannon despite Lasch’s lifelong criticism of capitalism and the free market. Nevertheless it also included a few of his most religious thought, including “The Soul of Man Under Secularism,” an essay that trenchantly observed that our belief in “the precise to be completely happy”—that uniquely American addition to Locke’s universal rights—was itself psychologically immature. The truly effective counter in American life was religious belief and practice, Lasch noted: a recognition of the transcendence of God and the acceptance of limitations on our ambitions and appetites in consequence. As he often did, Lasch comes across as quite the grump on the topic—but as usual, he had a degree.
Lasch trenchantly observed that our belief in “the precise to be completely happy”—that uniquely American addition to Locke’s universal rights—was itself psychologically immature.
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Our poetry selection for this week is “Fellowship,” by Christian Wiman. Readers can view all of America’s published poems here.
On this space every week, America features reviews of and literary commentary on one particular author or group of writers (each recent and old; our archives span greater than a century), in addition to poetry and other offerings from America Media. We hope it will give us a probability to offer you more in-depth coverage of our literary offerings. It also allows us to alert digital subscribers to a few of our online content that doesn’t make it into our newsletters.
Other Catholic Book Club columns:
Theophilus Lewis brought the Harlem Renaissance to the pages of America
William Lynch, the best American Jesuit you’ve probably never heard of
The spiritual depths of Toni Morrison
Parish priest, sociologist, novelist: The various imaginations of Father Andrew Greeley
Leonard Feeney, America’s only excommunicated literary editor (to this point)
Completely happy reading!
James T. Keane
